Not Forgetting The Whale

by John Ironmonger

Kenny Kennet saw the whale.

man named Joe was found.

Jeremy Melon, the naturalist,

Kenny Kennet, the beachcomber.

Old Man Garrow the fisherman was there,

Aminata Chikelu, the young nurse,

Few of us live quite as intimately with death as nurses do;

Never more true than now in the time of the Coronavirus.

She was blessed with the coffee-and-cream complexion that spoke of a cocktail of genes within her ancestry,

Jeremy Melon the naturalist and writer.

‘priapic’.

relating to or resembling a phallus.

Casey Limber the net-maker,

cetacean

a marine mammal of the orderCetacea; a whale, dolphin, or porpoise.

his prominent erection; his ‘priapic state’,

See above

It was the terrible inertia of crisis that held them back.

a mass at rest tends to remain at rest

The immobility of indecision.

St Piran

Casey Limber the net-maker

Jessie Higgs the shopkeeper,

Captain O’Shea the harbour master,

Polly Hocking the vicar’s wife

Martha Fishburne the...

St Piran had felt, on that first encounter, like the condensation of despair into stone, the furthest-flung outpost of an empire of melancholy.

The sky was as grey as a battleship.

The sea was as grey as iron.

great fin whale.’

‘In a manner,’ said Kenny. Just as it was not in the character of the beachcomber to see profit in the whale, nor did he appear to seek anything from this stranger.

A great judder

shake and vibrate rapidly and with force.

Polly Hocking, the vicar’s wife,

Demelza Trevarrick.

The Romance writer

Demelza was a writer of romantic novels.

klaxon?’

an electric horn or a similar loud warning device.

The population, Dr Mallory Books had confidently informed Joe, was three hundred and seven.

‘The winter population,’ he had said. ‘Three hundred and eight,’

on the tippetiest tip of the teeniest toe of the country

animus,

hostility or ill feeling.

‘Thar’ she blows!’ called Kenny Kennet.

(:

Somebody whooped, and Jeremy Melon started to clap, and pretty soon they were all applauding, their numb hands beating out the rhythm of celebration.

There was a comfortable silence, the kind that only a very good whisky can enable.

‘In a village of three hundred people you’re going to have three or four deaths a year.

I’ve heard about people who ended their lives by walking into the sea. Didn’t Virginia Woolf do that?

In 1941, at age 59, Woolf died by putting rocks in her coat pockets and drowning herself in the River Ouse at Lewes.

Besides, I’m too young to die. And I have a promise to keep.’

The promise to keep comes full circle by the end of the book

‘She filled her coat pockets with stones,’ Books said. ‘Who did?’ ‘Virginia Woolf.’ ‘Ah.’ ‘And on that note,’ Books finished his drink, ‘I think we should retire.’

Short-traders

Short sellers bet on, and profit from, a drop in a security's price.

short selling.

Short selling occurs when an investor borrows a security and sells it on the open market,

The key to short selling was market intelligence; and intelligence was the only commodity of any true value in the money markets.

Short selling has a high risk/reward ratio: It can offer big profits, but losses can mount quickly and infinitely.

Boolean logic.

rued

the blowsy scent of female perspiration.

We can’t all short the same stock. That’s why the regression analysis is failing.’

How long ago it all seemed now. Five years since they had started work on the system that would change everything.